Manly Thor's Day Special

The Season of Brideshead
Such a lot of nonsense: the pleasures and evils of absurdity
Following along with the travesty on the idea of visits to the underworld and the passions of martyrs, Charles Ryder now spends a stretch in purgatory in the form of a long stay with his father.  The first part of this chapter is a rich and hilariously absurd bit of writing. It is, unlike the rest of the novel, the style that Waugh was famous for before Brideshead Revisited. With a telling difference. If we compare this section with, for example, Tony Last's imprisonment by a madman in the jungle who makes him read him Dickens for what will presumably be the rest of his life, we see that Charles is treated much more sympathetically than Last. Even though Last's plight is immeasurably worse, we care much less about him as a human being than we do about Charles' much lighter, and entirely deserved, plight.

Or is that because Last's plight is immeasurably worse. In other novels, Waugh exaggerates and glories in absurdity. Here the absurdity is less inflated and because it is, we are more aware of its maliciousness. Because it is not blown up to the point that it seems irredeemably fictional, we can see Charles' sympathetically.

Absurdity and black humour are a regular feature of Waugh's novels. I've never been able to make it through Helena so I don't know about it but we get a healthy dose in every one of Waugh's other novels. In Brideshead a pleasure in absurdity is a particularly noticeable feature of Edward Ryder's outlook on life and we see it in full force through the first part of this chapter.

Before I tell you what I think is happening here, let me take you back to a fragment that Waugh published under the title "Work Suspended" a few years before Brideshead Revisited. This was Waugh's previous attempt to write a magnum opus; by that, I mean it was a previous attempt to write a novel that would allow Waugh to write about what he believed in instead of just being a satirist sniping from the sidelines. He abandoned it but published a fragment.

There are a whole lot of interesting things to note about it. One is that Waugh discovered that he could take a story and change its whole meaning by adding an epilogue. Stuck with this fragment he added an epilogue that tied his work suspended to the larger notion of everything being suspended because of the war that had just broken out. This framing with an epilogue or prologue is an idea whose application to Brideshead is pretty clear.

In "Work Suspended" we also have a father-son relationship that in some respects mirrors the relationship between Charles and Edward Ryder in Brideshead. In the earlier work, the painter who rejects modern art is the father. The son and first person narrator, a man named John Plant, is a mystery fiction writer who copes with life's problems by cultivating an appreciation of the absurd. Rather than suffer at the slings and arrows of the unfairness and absurdity of life, he learns to enjoy it.

This is a character trait with a long and distinguished lineage in the English Novel. Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice begins that novel dealing with life that way and we see it, most notably, in the way she makes a joke of the way Darcy insults her. We see it also in her father, from whom she has obviously learned this coping mechanism, in the way he is thrilled to invite Mr. Collins to his home precisely because he hopes to get amusement from seeing the pompous twit in action.

By making John Plant a writer of non-serious books, Waugh was exploring the place of his own fiction, he was, as it were, struggling with his place in history.

At the beginning of the fragment, John Plant is in Morocco (hmmm?) where he learns that his father has died after being hit by a truck on the street in London. He is unable to get to London in time for the funeral but soon after must leave Morocco for other reasons I won't go into here.

When he gets to London, he gets hit with a bit of absurdity. A man approaches him and asks to borrow money based on some relationship between them that John cannot grasp at first and that the other man is being vague about. It turns out that the man seeking to borrow money is Atwater, the man who drove the truck that killed John's father and who now seems to think that this connection will make John sympathetic to his plight.

Later in the story, a pregnant woman whom John Plant cares about deeply goes into a difficult labour (it lasts 48 hours). Plant is worried about his friend and he wanders around London looking for something, anything, that will distract him from worrying about Lucy. And he runs into Atwater again. He starts going around town with the man buying him drinks and settling Atwater's tab at his club for him. At one point they have this conversation (Atwater speaks first):

'Feeding animals while men and women starve,' he said bitterly.

...

'The animals are paid for their entertainment value,' I said. 'We don't send out hampers to monkeys in their own forests'—or did we? There was no telling what humane ladies in England would not do—'We bring the monkeys here to amuse us.'

'What's amusing about that black creature there?'

'Well, he's very beautiful.'

"Beautiful?' Atwater stared into the hostile face beyond the bars. 'Can't see it myself.' Then rather truculently, 'I suppose you'd say he was more beautiful than me?'

'Well, as a matter of fact, since you raise the point ...'

'You think think that thing beautiful and feed it and shelter it, while you leave me to starve.'

This seemed unfair. I had just given Atwater a pound; moreover it was not I who had fed the ape. I pointed this out.

'I see,' said Atwater. 'You're paying me for my entertainment value. You think I'm a kind of monkey.'

This was uncomfortably near the truth. 'You misunderstand me,' I said.

And it goes on. I think this is a key turning point for Waugh. Waugh's earlier fiction does with the whole world what Plant is doing with Atwater here. And what that fiction did is exactly what MacIntyre says Henry James meant to highlight in his novels:

James is concerned with rich aesthetes whose interest is to fend off the kind of boredom that is so characteristic of modern leisure by contriving behaviour in others that will be responsive to their wishes, that will feed their sated appetites.

John Plant is looking for distraction of a different sort, he knows someone in pain, but if we step back and consider Waugh the novelist up until this point, and we the readers, we have to acknowledge that there is no pain from those perspectives. From those perspectives there is only fictional characters here for our entertainment. And it's not much of a stretch to start treating real people the same way we treat these fictional characters there for our entertainment.

And that is what Edward Ryder does in life. His wry comments at Charles concern over Sebastian's injury are funny and not beside the point but he is not nearly concerned enough at others' pain. It troubles him not at all that he has put his dinner guests through a miserably boring evening just so he could be entertained.

Have you ever read A Room With a View by EM Forster? If you have read it (as opposed to just sitting down with the Merchant-Ivory film adaptation) you might want to read a couple of biographies of Forster. For when you do, one of the shocking discoveries is that Cecil Vyse in A Room With a View is a viciously cruel caricature of EM Forster. Done by anyone other than Forster himself, this caricature would be morally offensive.

I'd suggest the same thing is happening here. In Edward Ryder, Evelyn Waugh created a cruel caricature of himself. Read some biographical material on Waugh and you will see lots of examples of behaviour much like what Edward Ryder does. This is also a shot at his own works up until this point. "This is where you end up if you keep going the way you have been," seems to be what he is saying to himself here.

(Waugh reverts to something much more like his earlier style in the Sword of Honour trilogy, I think unfortunately. The first volume, for example, features a character with the telling name of Apthorpe who seems to be there for no more reason than a ape at the zoo.)

The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post will be here.